


Matt Murdock would not make a good duckling

by rosydays



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, M/M, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 10:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30020661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosydays/pseuds/rosydays
Summary: In which Matt falls into a river.
Relationships: Matt Murdock & Franklin "Foggy" Nelson
Kudos: 21





	Matt Murdock would not make a good duckling

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my first foray into writing fanfic. Longtime reader but thought I'd give writing a go! Comments very welcome, but please be nice! 
> 
> CN: Sensory overload and a passage that could be read as considering suicide. Please see end notes if you need more detail.

**The Water**

And they said let there be light.

But, always – or at least for so long he barely remembers otherwise – all Matt could see was fire. The kind of fire that doesn’t leave shadows, doesn’t ever stop burning. An eternal world of not quite light and never quite dark. Ironic, really, when the gossips, the papers, the whisperers, they say he lives in the shadows.

Shadows need light, yes – that’s true. But his shadows? They positively thrive in sunlight. To him, shadows are strange gaps that appear in his world-on-fire during the hottest days of summer. Sound waves refracting and distorting through columns of hot air rising from baking tarmac. They are in how much harder it is to make sense of anything, anything at all, when he is surrounded by scents of barbecuing meat and sounds of children shrilly screaming and shooting each other with arcs of barely perceptible water, in the warm holidays with Foggy’s family. They are the overwhelming stench of Hell's Kitchen in July. Sweat and ice cream. Too hot rubber on overheated roads. The never ending undertone of air conditioning and all the windows open spilling so much noise from the buildings with none.

The closest he can get to darkness, in his shadowless flickering world, is to douse the fire. Water does the job, but only by banking and banking it. Raising the flames until it all becomes too much – too bright. Everything burning and nothing left to perceive. God help him, but he can hear everything in the water. Baths, pools even – they are bearable, but rivers? The open ocean? He is a receiver utterly saturated by noise. Sound travels faster in water. Every vibration amplified compared to what he would hear on land.

Not to mention touch, taste, smell. He can feel every undulation of the water and it’s all mixed up in his head – the vibrations _are_ sound, but they’re playing all over his skin, in his hair. He is feeling sound and he’s hearing touch and…

And he can taste it too; opening his mouth, involuntarily gasping for any shred of air. Yes, he gets the salt, the oil, the decaying organic matter, the tens, hundreds, of other small tastes that a homeopath would give good money to be able to distinguish in water that most people would just say tastes a bit like salt. But he can feel all the vibrations in the water on his tongue, filling his airways, even as he chokes on his failed breath and adds his own frantic not quite sounds back into the teeming never ending mass of so much fucking sound.

Smell. Smell is much the same as the water fills his nose. He is floating in sound, making sound, becoming sound. And at the same time this absolute unbearable brightness is more like night than anything he has experienced since he was nine years old.

There is no point closing his eyes as he drifts – never any point in closing his eyes; no respite from his world of flames. But this? This white out, solar flare, eclipse? (He never has the words, oh God but he never does. It took people lives and stories and centuries to build a language. Wordsmith by day he may be, but he cannot create a culture by himself.) He wonders if just letting himself float in the light; just this once. Would it really be such a sin? Eyes as pointlessly open as ever, each sense entirely at capacity. The world alight and Matt so much a part of it. Truly blind, yes. But alone? No, he cannot be alone when he no longer exists.

Matt drifts.

**The calm**

Did Matt want to be a hero? Honestly? A little bit. At least, when he was the child of Jack Murdock. When he read Captain America comics in the corner of Fogwells and watched his Dad hit punching bags and people with equal precision.

But Matt knows he’s not a hero. He’s never liked labels, really. So many people have slapped them on him; tried to define him by them:

Orphan (but he has a mother now)

Blind ( _I am, Foggy, I am)._

Inspiration (said the papers when he was 17 and a crippled boy from Hell’s Kitchen going away to college. Didn’t say the papers when he was 27 and in the horrible mess that was Castle’s trial)

Smartest (He was going to be, had to be, and oh Lord, the weight of it)

Disabled (see, Blind. See; reading, see; hearing everyone in your building and then some. See; doing that all the time)

Soldier ( _I won’t. I must, I can’t. It cost me everything)_

Lawyer (see, best friend. See, liar. See, vigilante).

Vigilante (addiction? In recovery? Necessary?)

Best friend (See; liar)

Liar.

Hero (See, above).

Murderer (Not even for her, not even for him)

Son (all he wanted, for such a long time. He doesn’t know how to be a son again. Doesn’t know that he wants to do that).

And, really, he can’t be all of these things. He isn’t any of these things ( _Liar)_. He’s tried so hard to be some of them. He’s tried so hard to avoid many of them. He can’t think like this; he’s done trying to fit into the slightly different boxes everyone places in front of him. Trying to be too many different things to too many different people.

He’s still drifting when the oversaturated whiteout begins to fade. He’s – choking. There are – arms? Pushing on his chest. He tries to twist away; punches upwards but fails to connect. His senses are still re-equilibrating.

Everything is ringing still with too much noise, too much input. He can’t recognise the hands on him. He tries to regain his bearings – is that, Luke? Yes, it seems to be. Okay.

Perhaps he blacks out; attaining air is proving problematic. It feels like the spins crossed with pneumonia. Everything is fairly terrible for an unspecified but lengthy period of time.

When the world begins to make sense again, he seems to be lying on his couch.

“Matt, you idiot”

Ah, Foggy’s here. Matt smiles and finally welcomes the fading of those last traces of oversaturated whiteout/darkness. Everything will be okay now.  
  
He doesn't like labels, but even now, with all that's passed between them, "Foggy" is sufficient. He hopes he can just be "Matt" again, to Foggy. 

**Author's Note:**

> Longer content notice: no character death occurs and the character does not actively consider suicide, however whilst at risk of drowning, Matt experiences a sensory overload and doesn't attempt to get out of the water by himself (but he is pulled out by another character!).
> 
> Thanks for reading :)


End file.
